21–30 of 87 posts
One of my first jobs, was as a maintenance engineer, on a 100KLoC+ codebase of 1979s-era FORTRAN IV. No comments. No subroutines (what we now call “functions”). No variable name longer than 4 characters. Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger. It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that. BTW: with toda…
One of my first jobs, was as a maintenance engineer, on a 100KLoC+ codebase of 1979s-era FORTRAN IV. No comments. No subroutines (what we now call “functions”). No variable name longer than 4 characters. Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger. It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that. BTW: with toda…
One of my first jobs, was as a maintenance engineer, on a 100KLoC+ codebase of 1979s-era FORTRAN IV. No comments. No subroutines (what we now call “functions”). No variable name longer than 4 characters. Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger. It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that. BTW: with toda…
2 things 1. LLM can fix this in my experience. an LLM, especially the more modern ones, have way more short term memory than most humans (or at least way more than me). They can dig through this kind of code and figure out all the edge cases, write test, suggest various paths to make things better and then execute on those paths. On request they will happily setup dev systems, staging systems, whatever it takes to ma…
You are the very first person I encountered who claim LLM can fix technical debt. Usually I seem comments and articles saying LLM can only produce it. And I can agree with those articles and comments
2 things 1. LLM can fix this in my experience. an LLM, especially the more modern ones, have way more short term memory than most humans (or at least way more than me). They can dig through this kind of code and figure out all the edge cases, write test, suggest various paths to make things better and then execute on those paths. On request they will happily setup dev systems, staging systems, whatever it takes to ma…
You are the very first person I encountered who claim LLM can fix technical debt. Usually I seem comments and articles saying LLM can only produce it. And I can agree with those articles and comments
https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7...
Here's the result of a prompt that specifically looks for correctness and simplifications to make "by construction" before I added "Design bar: ensure correctness by construction rather than by convention" to AGENTS.md:
https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7...
The worst I have experienced: A 30,000-line .cs file. A giant monolithic program tangled together by Singleton abuse, 6-deep nested if/else blocks, and the list goes on. There are too many to count. And this is a sight I see every single day. This is the exact landscape I encounter at many companies when I go in for maintenance work. Encapsulation completely shattered as a direct reflection of the subcontracting powe…
We found a 4000 Loc single-file single-function c program running a functional safety domain. With nesting so deep that you need to change the font-size or get a wider monitor. We're not allowed to touch or replace it because it's pre-certified.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are the very first person I encountered who claim LLM can fix technical debt. Usually I seem comments and articles saying LLM can only produce it. And I can agree with those articles and comments
Trivially debunked with the prompt "find technical debt to fix". https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7... Here's the result of a prompt that specifically looks for correctness and simplifications to make "by construction" before I added "Design bar: ensure correctness by construction rather than by convention" to AGENTS.md: https://github.com/danneu/danterm/blob/749942ffa1198f520c8b7...
One of my first jobs, was as a maintenance engineer, on a 100KLoC+ codebase of 1979s-era FORTRAN IV. No comments. No subroutines (what we now call “functions”). No variable name longer than 4 characters. Fun. The most effective debug tool, was a Ouija board. It made me an expert WAGger. It was the main reason that I am so anal about code Quality, these days. I never want to subject anyone else to that. BTW: with toda…
> BTW: with today’s LLMs, there’s really no excuse for badly-documented, or badly-formatted code. You can write a thousand lines of commercial-grade spaghetti, and tell the LLM to format and document it. And how do you know that the documentation is correct? Because if it's not, it's worse than being absent. The verification work sounds close to as hard as writing it in the first place. This is what I never grasp whe…
2 things 1. LLM can fix this in my experience. an LLM, especially the more modern ones, have way more short term memory than most humans (or at least way more than me). They can dig through this kind of code and figure out all the edge cases, write test, suggest various paths to make things better and then execute on those paths. On request they will happily setup dev systems, staging systems, whatever it takes to ma…
You are the very first person I encountered who claim LLM can fix technical debt. Usually I seem comments and articles saying LLM can only produce it. And I can agree with those articles and comments